Creo Six Degrees - 2.04

July 20, 2004 > Arvada, Colorado based rTG (Ralston Technology Group) has purchased Creo's Six Degrees Personal Desktop Search tool. We have released a product update, and it is now available for purchase here.

For all product and support issues please contact Ralston at help@ralstontech.com
or visit their website at www.ralstontech.com <http://www.ralstontech.com> for information.
Creo's Six Degrees is now Clarity v.2.0.5

Creo Inc., has been a subsidiary of Kodak.

I have read some of the reviews posted here previously, and based on that, I would't even have downloaded the app. Lucky me, I had the opportunity to try it unbiased, and truly, it completely changed the way I'm looking to emails. My email archive just became a source of valuable information, a true searchable knowledge base. (I have kept mails since 2001) Before, it was just a pile of junk.

I don't know how the previous versions looked like, maybe they were immature, but this one, the web based one is excellent. And I like the web interface a lot, and in this particular case, I think it is far more useful than a dedicated cocoa interface. I surf my mails like I surf the web, and I can take advantage of all the power of Safari to do that.

I rely heavily on mails, have 4 email accounts, and so far I have tried everything to try to keep my mails organized (filters, scripts, all existing email clients, you name it, I've tried). None of them worked. They either require that I continuously maintain and upgrade filters, or sort mails (one way or the other) manually. Never found anything. Did my filter cach it? Then its here. Oh, no, it did't, so there it must be. No, I've put it elsewhere manually. Unless it came from this mailbox, because then surely it is here. And so on.

All of this changed, now I can find anything in a snap, and the search is extremely reliable (I could't believe by eyes so I double checked manually - I'd hate to loose track of sg because it just does't show up in the search results).

But then, a lot a mail programs have search functions, so what? The thing is, lots of the time I don't know what keywords to search for. So, with 6D, I can start on a fuzzy idea, like this person was involved somehow. Not necesarily the person I sent the mail to, nor the one who received it, but was surely "around" at the time. So I start with him, and hop from related messages to related persons to related messages again, and suddenly the whole thing comes back to me again, and there's the info I wanted. Only a couple of minutes, and I'm back into the context of what I was doing a year ago. It's brilliant.

But more than this, 6D keeps track of persons I usually communicate with, mails that were addressed jus to me, builds a contact database based on the domains of email adresses it ever saw (you can find all persons from a particular company in a snap, based on domains), builds contexts (related persons, related files, related messages) of anything you are focusing on, keeps threads with your replies so you have the full picture, automatically adds messages, persons and files to your projects (you can define projects) automatically (with "show related", but of course you have to feed it some messages at first to get it started), keeps track of mails you need to do something with (to-dos). And all of this without having to type a single rule, a single filter, or any code. Nothing. You just have to use it, and mails do "organize themselves" as if by magic.

Oh, and btw. it does a nice gallery for you from your media attachments. And has RSS feeds of your to-do list and projects that you can read with any RSS capable news aggregator.

It integrates with any POP or IMAP accout, and can import from Entourage (Outlook), Mail, Eudora, and standard .mbx mailboxes (like the one POCO mail uses). Import from Entourage and Outlook (.pst files) is disabled in the free version, but if you have an Exchange Server wit IMAP access, that's not a problem. What the paid version really does for you, is the ability to have unlimited projects and to-dos, not just a few.

So I stopped all my rules on my mail client, they were useless anyway. My inbox NOW looks like a warzone after a hurricane, but I don't care, I'ts not where I work anymore. AND my mails are better organized then ever before.

It's an essential tool, most likely the best around, but it's not perfect (yet). It needs some power and memory, as java apps do. There is some functionality missing, like the ability to select my own domain (it just picks one), the integration with Mail needs some fine-tuning to be done, you can't delete or send messages to the to/do list in bulks (you can only do this for projects now), I miss an "any other mail sent to you" section in the summary, and there are a few others. I hope all of this is going to be taken care of in due time.

But also, it has a great potential for future development, like web access to your database from anywhere (disabled in this version), it could also act as a web mail client, and become your "personal mail portal", could become a true contact management database with additional editable fields, could develop into a great groupware or general usage knowledge base product. It's so well done, it could easily grow into any of those. But it's also complete as it is, as a mail search and organising tool.

All in all, my verdict: excellent, a must-have tool, I don't know how I managed to do without it for so many years. It's here with me to stay. (goes without saying: I registered it, it's not cheap, but it's worth every penny, at least for someone who depends on mail as much as me)